I am a huge fan of WordPress – have been for years. And over the years, I’ve learned some tips and tricks to make life a little easier. The first of these is finding the right plugins. Plugins can make your life so much easier.

So, here’s my Top Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins:

1. Akismet – This baby blocks just about every spam comment on my site. It’s a standard WordPress plugin, which should be included with the installation of your WordPress blog on your server. If it isn’t, make sure this is one of the first plugins you activate. Don’t believe it’s worth it? Check out my stats:



2. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Even for a WordPress addict expert superfan such as myself, upgrading to the newest version of WordPress can be tricky. This plugin takes all the guesswork out of upgrading. I always include this plugin when I set up a client’s new blog. It’s a life saver.
3. All in one SEO Pack – SEO has quickly become a hot topic on the interwebs. (and, rightly so.) SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a fancy way of saying “ranking higher in google and other search engines.” This plugin requires a little work after it’s installed. You can’t just install it and expect it to do all the work for you. Once installed, you should see this box near the bottom of the page whenever you are creating a new post.
   Here’s where you’re going to summarize your blog post with keywords in both the title and the description. Here’s an example of what I did for this post:
   
4. Twitter Tools – These days, everyone is all-a-Twitter, and rightly so. The social networking site is addicting. There are plenty of place where you can find out more about Twitter if you’re not already on it – just Google “what is twitter” and you should get a bazillion results. It’s a great, free tool you should be using for your blog/business. This plugin will automatically tweet for you each time a new blog is posted. Basically, it saves you the step of writing up a tweet and shortening the url yourself.
5. Sociable – This is one of my new favorite plugins. It will help your posts become viral. If your readers want to share your post, they don’t have to grab the url and post it into a tweet, on their Facebook page, fark, digg or stumble upon. All they have to do is click on one of the little icons (you should see it at the bottom of this post) and voila! Your post has viral potential.

There are thousands of plugins out there and I’m hoping to start blogging more about the techie side of me! If you have any good plugins you’d like me to check out, post a comment.